I have a soft spot for old computers. A while back, I inherited a Sony Vaio PCG-XG29 laptop that had obviously seen its share of travel and abuse. Recently, I've decided to work on the machine a little and try to see if I can bring it back from being a useless, unsecured Win98 block of circuits to something more useful using some flavor of Unix.

Well, I managed to install VectorLinux on it but it was obvious that the 128mb of RAM that it was pushing wasn't going to cut it. After scouring the Web, I found a cheap place to buy some old RAM and I manage to snag another stick of 128mb which would max out the system at 256mb of RAM. It's not a lot compared to today's machines, but it's all that this baby can handle. The

Today, this battle-scarred Vaio lives on. AbiWord and Firefox are now happy with the extra RAM and I am actually posting this entry using those applications.

YouTube is choppy but I think it will always be choppy since the processor is not fast enough to deal with online video. I tried Pandora Radio on it and that seemed to work pretty well.

The DVD drive works will with Xine, so I can also use the bugger as a DVD player.

The only thing left to do to is to make this system portable again. I'm going to need to replace the dead battery but I'll save that project for another day.

All in all, it's a good day to bring back old computers to life!

Labels: computer repair, geriatric tech, linux, tech addiction

Here's another laptop that has been resurected from the trash heap and turned into a light web surfing and wordprocessing machine through the miracle of Elvis and Vector Linux.

A long time ago, I was afraid of Linux because I wasn under the misconception that the installation would be ultra complicated. It turns out that I just need to find the right flavor of Linux that would work for me. Vector Linux from http://vectorlinux.com/ was the one that has worked out for me. So, now I have another computer to add to my personal computer lab. Maybe, I'll use this machine for company events to use as a kiosk for people to surf my company's website. Maybe, I'll use it just for blogging.

Labels: computer repair, linux, mobile computing